


Cotton Candy Eggshells

by SandrC



Category: Captain Underpants Series - Dav Pilkey, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017), The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants (Cartoon)
Genre: Dreams, Let Krupp be happy!, Soft identity reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 15:17:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18640717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandrC/pseuds/SandrC
Summary: He flies in Easter egg dye, praying the colors stick to his skin in even the waking hours. Sugar-sweet colors seep through his memories here, until he himself is a pastel impression of his anxieties and anger.





	Cotton Candy Eggshells

**Author's Note:**

> To combat the darkness that permeated the waking moments of Swiss Cheese, have some soft fluff.
> 
> I like the idea that Benjamin doesn't know he's Captain Underpants, but he dreams Cap's memories.
> 
> I can't escape food names apparently lmao.
> 
> Sunrises look like Easter egg dye. Soft pastels and clouds that look nice enough to sleep on. I wanna fly myself, were it not for my acrophobia.
> 
> Art references out the ass y'all! Can you tell I like art? Coz I like art.

He flies in his dreams.

The skies above, done up in blues and pinks and purples, bleeding into one another, is an ocean. Free, laughing gleefully, he flies. Even if he knows, in this dream, that he has to land and help them out.

All good things. _All good things._

But in his dreams, the early ones, he _flies_. He rests on whipped cream clouds in a cotton candy sky. He watches pink become a stark cerulean and then, from there, dip back into an endless navy. Royal blues, Phoenician shellfish smeared across a canvas.

But _all good things_ , in time.

* * *

He fights in his dreams.

They are not the fights of his childhood—bruised lips, leather and metal, bloodied knuckles and noses, slurs he dare not repeat. No, these fights are fantastical, if not a _bit_ absurd.

He _wins_ , of course, as one does in dreams. He fights and he _wins_ and they are there, beside him.

The fights are fast and moving. They're grawlixes shouted over pop-art bubbles. They're speed lines and flipbooks of two-frame animations. They're wild and _truly_ the brightest parts of these dreams. And in the end, after the bad guy is put away and _oh-so-sorry_ for what they've done and they congratulate him, he flies again.

He flies in Easter egg dye, praying the colors stick to his skin in even the waking hours. Sugar-sweet colors seep through his memories here, until he himself is a pastel impression of his anxieties and anger.

* * *

He smiles in his dreams.

That isn't to say that he _doesn't_ smile otherwise. _He does_. They are few and far between, these moments of smiles—smoky spices of a homecooked meal made with love, lapis lazuli beneath a curtain of jet and onyx, the warm impression of small arms wrapped around his impressive waist—but they _are_. It's just that, in this liminal space of endless and boundless joy, he has more reason to smile.

 _So he does_.

Laughter, an arpeggio, pizzicatto plucked on cello strings, is an easier sound here. Unburdened by waking worries, the drumming of his heart beats a bossa nova riff along the kalimba of his ribs. He sings songs of grandeur and wonder. And they join in.

But he is an _adult_. He can't spend _all_ his time asleep, even if he _wants_ to. He wakes up and abandons the ideal for the real with resignation and understanding.

This is how it is. This is how _life_ is.

* * *

He thinks of cotton candy and whipped cream as he eats a bland cereal and picks out boring clothes. He thinks of jagged sound effects and crosshatched textures as he drives to work with talk radio filling the space behind his ears. He thinks of a string quartet and trembling winds as he trudges through work. He thinks of lapis lazuli and smoky burning warmth that settles inside him as he heads home, a part of his memory carved out with a knife more often than not.

At the end of the day he lays down, wrapped in thin sheets, and _lets go_.

* * *

He is not alone in his dreams.

There are many who like him in his dreams. _Many_ people who laugh and smile and thank him endlessly, his name muffled behind the fog of waking. But there are two constants who remain beside him and keep him from being alone in a crowded room.

On one hand, George. Resolute and level headed, creative, and smart in all the wrong ways. Words for every occasion and the sense to use them well, sharpened like weapons and softened like bandages.

On the other, Harold. Excitable and carefree, imaginative, and energetic enough to power a city. Paints the world in colors no one has words for yet and sharp as a whip.

They are there when he dreams. _Always_ there. If they aren't when he starts, they arrive soon after.

Constant. Comforting. The _best_ part of dreaming.

Because he's been alone long enough.

It is nice to not be, even if for a little while.

So he dreams and he flies and he fights and he smiles and all the while, he is no longer alone, and it is more than he could have _ever_ asked for.


End file.
